This Swedish Tech School Teaches AI Ethics 'Like A Muscle'

Classes at the Hyper Island business school can be uncomfortable at times.

When its master’s degree students come up with an idea for a digital business model, the professors will poke as many ethical holes in it as they can.

Stanford University, a spawning ground for Google, Cisco, Yahoo, Netflix and the recently disgraced Theranos, said earlier this month that it would start integrating ethics more deeply into its technology courses.

Hyper Island says it’s already been doing that for 20 years.

In a typical module, teachers at the “alternative degree provider” will regularly ask questions about the impact of a digital service that’s being built, says Jonathan Briggs, a cofounder of the Swedish school, which also has branches in Manchester, U.K., Singapore, New York and São Paulo.

A professor will split the class up into two groups by getting them to vote on whether they’re pro-privacy or pro-personalization, before forcing them to argue against their own view.

“It’s a good way to push them away from their comfort zone,” says Briggs. He recalls supervising the business project of a student from the Philippines, which outsourced content moderation to people in developing countries.

The cost benefit analysis was clear: sending moderation jobs to countries where labour costs were low would protect profit margins.

“But sometimes the people were looking at extremely violent images and film,” says Briggs. He challenged the student to question whether she was creating essentially “good” jobs or bad jobs, and what would happen to the jobs and workers in the future.

Obvious questions perhaps, but some would argue that consumers today are addicted to social media and smartphones because ethics wasn’t more deeply integrated into leading technology schools like Stanford University in the past, and for the students who went on to lead the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple.

The average person checks their phone more than 150 times a day, says Tash Willcocks, who heads up the Manchester, U.K. division of of Hyper Island. “We live by the design choices of others.”

Hyper Island has around 150 master’s degree students across the world, mostly in physical classes, paying £11,000 ($14,500) a year to be on the graduate course. “The students’ ability to make ethical considerations should be trained like a muscle,” Wilcocks adds.

The school funds itself by running a parallel consultancy business in which it provides training on digital transformation to large companies. When Briggs spoke to Forbes, for instance, he was in Hong Kong training the staff of a large liquor company.

Many of the school’s students are already in full-time work and will take classes over the weekend before returning to work the following Monday. This gives students a chance to more quickly apply concepts they’ve just learned, Briggs argues.

“We might pick up a news story that was breaking today and integrate that into our teaching,” he adds. “I respect Stanford and Harvard immensely … but I think that the live problem, the things that are happening right now, that’s potentially where we might have an edge.”

I cover developments in AI, robotics, chatbots, digital assistants and emerging tech in Europe. I've spent close to a decade profiling the hackers and dreamers who are bringing the most cutting-edge technology into our lives, for better or worse. I'm the author of "We Are ...